Tag: wordpress

Easy Setup

I’ve been meaning to play with honeypots for quite some time, and if I’d given it just a little more research, I’d have started much sooner. This is because shortly after deciding upon glastopf as the first on my list of honey pots to try out, I came across mhn, an open source project by Threat Stream.

The Modern Honeypot Network (mhn) makes not only launching honeypots insanely easy, but it serves as a nice way of monitoring multiple honeypots as well. Digital Ocean Droplets seemed like a cheap and safe way of getting started, and I quickly found this post by Lenny Zeltser which provides pretty good directions to anyone wanting to do this themselves.

My initial plan to create a single glastpof installation evolved into two more honeypots, one being dionea, and the other Wordpot.

Results So Far

After only 2 days of attacks there has certainly been a lot recorded, but I’ve not had the time to properly look into any of them yet. The Most prominent port for probes seems to be 5060, looking for phone system vulnerabilities I assume. Dionea has yet to capture any binaries, and Wordpot has been probed only 4 times.

I did do port scans on a few of the attacking IP Addresses and have seen a few older versions of Windows (2003, XP) with open VNC ports…

Further

With more time will come more data, and then the real fun begins.

The REST API included in the MHN Framework makes sending the data to other applications simple. You can view the data for my honeypots over the Last 24 hours here.

UPDATE 10/4/2016

I’ve stopped running my droplets recently. Other projects have taken up the bulk of my time and I no longer have the time to dedicate to monitoring them. The plugin I was using to connect this site and the Modern Honey Network Server can be found on my Github here

WordPress makes up some large percentage of the web. As I’m writing this, web development firms all over the world are churning out WordPress sites for their clients. Some of these installs are vanilla and basic, yet some come with exceedingly complicated plugin/theme combinations. WordPress’ ease of use is a double edged sword. The positive side being a developer may complete a feature rich, member’s only website in one day. The negative being, a multitude of plugins and code snippets written by other developers are included in these projects (other wise they wouldn’t be completed within a day). A good developer will make good choices as to what plugins to use, a novice developer may not be able to tell, and things can become dangerous.

Vulnerabilities to WordPress itself are often handleable via automatic updates. If a client has brought an outdated site to your firm, often best practice is to back up the site in it’s current configuration, update it, and turn updates on from there on out. Plugins and themes can be harder to manage as far as security is concerned, given the nature of developers working on these projects for free, having their own lives, and maybe leaving these projects behind all together.

OWASP WordPress Vulnerability Scanner Project

The Vulnerability Scanner Project is a black box testing script for WordPress installations. A full description can be found on the projects OWASP Wiki.

The scanner is that of a php script checking a multitude of things that you’d otherwise have to check manually. It does this by reading various bits of the sites source to determine core version, theme information, and plugin information which it references with wpvulndb.com’s wordpress vulnerability database. Because this is a black box testing method, it alerts you to things that any visitor to your site may potentially discover. This differs from plugins such as Wordfence, which provide you with insider information (white box). I must disclaim by saying, a script such as this is a valuable tool for a developer to check client’s sites, or their own sites quickly for obvious problems, but keep in mind it’s far from a comprehensive security audit.

Example Time

If you’re a debian user such as myself, you can get the dependencies for this with,sudo apt-get install php5 php5-cli php5-curl php5-json git

Create a directory to store the wp-scanner code and navigate into it. Then clone the repo,

git clone https://github.com/RamadhanAmizudin/Wordpress-scanner.git

I went ahead to the WordPress Release Archives and downloaded version 4.1.6, which has known issues (just about every old version has issues). For this example, the site is installed on my local machine’s apache server in a directory titled /epm, and there are no other plugins or themes installed on the test site.

Usage of the WordPress Vulnerability Scanner is fairly simple, and for a list of all options just give the -h flag. The example below scans the url “localhost/epm” with the default settings as defined by the -d flag, and references its findings with the wpvulndb.com as defined by –wpvulndb.